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The first application there is the oh so cleverly named "Photo Resizer".

I've mentioned a site that I was working on in the past and this is it. It is ad supported and Photo Resizer uses OpenCandy (see below). Like I've said before, I will be making as much as possible about the site open and transparent. You can find some of that transparency on the FAQ page. I will be posting more about it over time at my personal blog, Cynic.me. I've started to post some things there already under the "Super Simple" category.

Most of the posts so far are about Robosoft and PAD, and more of that will be coming along with other aspects as well. Some posts will be more marketing-centric, while others are more programming-centric. I've mentioned some topics here.

SOME TRANSPARENCY FOR THE DC CROWD:

The following are some summaries of future posts for Cynic.me.

OPENCANDY:

I know that some people here are going to hate it because I used OpenCandy. That's fine. There's nothing malicious or devious in there. I did my homework on the topic and have a clean conscience. My irrationalities towards a computer company named after delicious fruit (that keeps the doctor away) are well known here. Everyone has things that drive them nuts. I will write in detail about OpenCandy in the future.

REGISTRY SETTINGS:

Photo Resizer gives you an option to add a right-click context menu item to Windows Explorer so that you can right-click on a picture and open it directly in Photo Resizer. Other than that, I do not use the registry at all. Any other entries are done by the system, such as "Recently opened documents" (or document history) which are stored in the registry. Those are system controlled by Windows. The context menu option is optional and is for the following supported extensions:

bmp

gif

jpeg

jpg

png

svg

tif

tiff

It looks like this:

Photo Resizer does not take any file associations.

HELP:

While the program is simple enough, it includes a help file that is actually useful. (Thank you to mouser and DC for the H&M license~!) There are a lot of extra shortcuts in there.

The help file may seem long, but that is only because it is extensively illustrated with screenshots and illustrations.

TRACKING:

Photo Resizer keeps count of the number of photos that you have resized and the number of times that you have used it. None of that information is sent back or sent anywhere. YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON PRIVY TO THAT INFORMATION.

Part of the tracking is done using the Infralution Licensing System (ILS).

Why is it in there? (Make sure you can handle the truth...)

I got bored and thought it would be fun to look at statistics. Seriously. I've been using ILS for years, love it, and just thought stats would be fun. Incidentally, I went out for lunch the other week with the developer. We'd talked in the past, but it was nice to finally meet him.

The shortcut for stats is "s".

In the future, I may make it optional (as in opt-in) for people to send me stats so that I can improve the program. We'll see. Right now I'm thinking that there's a 20% chance of me doing that.

AUTOMATIC UPDATES:

There are no automatic updates. There is an automatic updater component in it, but it only checks to see if a new version is available. It does not install any new versions. The shortcut to check is "u".

It checks once a week. It can be hidden by clicking on it. There is no option at the moment to turn it off. That will be in a future release.

HUMOR:

The "About" page is mostly humorous and makes fun of a few things, including the target audience and myself.

Well, I hope that about sums everything up and I do hope that it gets a positive response from people here.

Now, you could download the installer then extract it with something like Universal Extractor (checked - doesn't work -- the installer is signed so UE can't extract it), and you'd have that, and it would run, but you wouldn't get the registry entries for the Windows Explorer integration or any of the shortcuts. I'll be explaining what the deployment files are in future blog posts.

Second reason, having a second deployment would require too much explanation and complicate things too much. The entire idea is to simplify things as much as possible for the target audience so as not to confuse them. Multiple deployment options (other than EXE vs. ZIP) requires having additional explanations which clutter up the page, which is something I'm trying to avoid.

Now, you could download the installer then extract it with something like Universal Extractor (checked - doesn't work -- the installer is signed so UE can't extract it), and you'd have that, and it would run, but you wouldn't get the registry entries for the Windows Explorer integration or any of the shortcuts. I'll be explaining what the deployment files are in future blog posts.

Second reason, having a second deployment would require too much explanation and complicate things too much. The entire idea is to simplify things as much as possible for the target audience so as not to confuse them. Multiple deployment options (other than EXE vs. ZIP) requires having additional explanations which clutter up the page, which is something I'm trying to avoid.

I sucessfully managed to uniextract the installer. I have got the same set of files in Photo-Resizer-Setup\{app} folder as in your deployment list above. Beautiful icon, btw.

Maybe you want to tell your users that it requires .net 4.0 to run and that the installer will DL and install it on their system if not present.

While I would love to take credit for a lot of the artwork, I actually bought it all and modified most of it. (Planning a post on purchasing artwork later.) I think there might be a few things that are original works by myself (the Super Simple logo is), but not many. Most is modified artwork. I can edit, but can't really create artwork.

The requirements is a moronic oversight on my part. I keep remembering it, then forget to put it up on the site. Off to do that now...

BTW - How did you extract the setup file? I tried quickly with Universal Extractor, but it threw an error. I gave up at that point.

Speed for Geeks and Ease for Technotards with Super Simple Photo Resizer

Who needs a trillion features when you can have speed and ease? That's Super Simple's new image resizer for Windows, Photo Resizer. Squarely aimed at non-techno-savvy people, Photo Resizer casts off complexity for ease and speed.